Why are my preview renders good and my actual renders totally black
Sorry... I'm an idiot.  In case there is anybody else out there who might benefit from this.  I decided not to render the window panes and so i didn't make them transparent and I clicked the little eye icon to hide it in the 3D view.  So when you do a preview render in cycles it gives you a preview of what is visible in the 3D view.  However hiding something in 3D view doesn't mean that it won't render.  So my non transparent windows that were hidden in the 3D view were blocking the sunlight from coming into the room.  Lesson of the story is hit the little camera icon next to an object in the Outliner to make it invisible to the rendering engine.

Thanks again for the responses.